Waiting for the Times again

Sure didn’t take long for the dust to settle after the New York Times’ May 10 feature about Hillary Clinton’s gusto for UFOs. The ensuing media blowup – which culminated two weeks ago in the previously unthinkable scenario of the White House press corps actually putting questions to a presidential mouthpiece in the West Wing – was intense but short-lived. Negating the conspiracy crowd’s contention than a sinister unseen hand imposes a gag order on the Fourth Estate when it comes to The Great Taboo, last month’s events tell us a couple of other things too: 1) When it comes to the gorilla in the room, the media still looks to the Times for cover, and 2) beyond that, newsies have no idea how to follow up.

“The truth is out there, and now The X-Files are a campaign issue,” began an ABC World News Tonight report, introduced with the hit show’s classic melody/montage but shedding no light on the real controversy. Hey, remember those presidential debate watch-parties where you take a shot of something heinous every time a candidate mentioned “Goldman Sachs” or “terrorism”? Imagine how wasted you’d get if we applied the same rules whenever the MSM includes “the truth is out there” or “out of this world” to its UFO reporting. You’d get smashed to smithereens reading Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page bloviations: “If ‘the truth is out there,’ as they say on ‘The X-Files’ TV show, Hillary Clinton says she’s eager to expose it.” Taking his cue from equally uninformed White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s non-answers to vague questions, Page went on to conclude that humans would probably invent space aliens if they couldn’t be confirmed because we humans are afraid of being alone in the universe: “As we have seen with various other conspiracy theories, people will believe what they want to believe, especially when the truth is far enough ‘out there.’”

Sometimes the leader of the pack is more like Evel Knievel than Marlon Brando/CREDIT: autoblog.com

Nevertheless, to his credit, the day after the Times produced its reheated “scoop” about HRC and UFOs, veteran CBS reporter Mark Knoller at least felt compelled to bring it up during the daily briefing with Earnest.

With cameras rolling, Knoller “wondered if the President would like to beat (Clinton) to the punch by showing his degree of transparency on this issue, which is of concern to a lot of Americans.” It was an awkward question because it also conflated UFOs with Area 51, and Earnest did his awkward best to laugh it off:

“Well,” Earnest managed, “I know that he has joked publicly before about one of the benefits of the presidency is having access to that information. I don’t know whether or not he has availed himself of that opportunity. But if we have more on this, we’ll let you know.”

Right. Definitely. Five days later, even less focused than Knoller was, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks tried it again. “There’s this increased interest in Roswell. You’re doing your dance at the podium about it,” she began, apparently noting Earnest’s dyspeptic body language. “Is there such a thing? Are you – look at you, you’re drinking so you’re trying to think.” Nervous laughter in the gallery. “Is there such a thing – are you keeping quiet because of security concerns? I mean, are we to think that there might be life beyond here? I mean – seriously. I mean, you need to answer this.”

I mean seriously, dude, I mean, how is anybody supposed to totally answer this? Security concerns? Over what, specifically? What was the question again? “I’ll just say, April, there are some questions that even the White House Press Secretary doesn’t have answers to, and this is one of them.” Ryan tells Earnest he’s not going to get off that easy. “Okay, well,” Earnest replies, “you keep trying.

“Kevin?”

Great to see the press finally growing just a tad more inquisitive. But getting tongue-tied and incoherent is a direct consequence of turning your brains over to the NY Times and not doing your own prep.

Will the media wait for the Times to investigate scores of USAF veterans eyewitness accounts of UFOs breaching security over America’s nuclear weapons sites? Will they sit on their hands until the Times gives them permission to ask why U.S. Customs and Border Protection won’t release a three-year-old UFO video that’s already been viewed 381,000 times on YouTube? Will they wait for The Times to start asking why the FAA began censoring radar records nearly 10 years after 9/11 only after researchers began making FOIAs to reconstruct the flight path of a bogey that buzzed President Bush’s “western White House” in Texas eight years ago?

And even if one or several corporate media outlets bucked the trend and conducted original reporting? Would anyone notice if the Times didn’t get there first?

…Pardon me while I smother a snigger. Waiting for the sclerotic Gray Lady to take the lead in original, knowledgeable and contextual reporting about the Great Taboo is like waiting for Godot.
I doubt a single reporter or editor there could tell you what Bruce Macabbee or Stan Friedman or Peter Sturrock or Robert Hastings is known for. (…”Wasn’t he in Sting’s band?”)
In that chasm of ignorance about the subject and its history, I suppose we should feel a measure of sympathy for the junior reporter who gets a directive from his/her editor: “Give me 1100 words on this UFO business and the campaign by deadline tomorrow.”
…gulp…
Is it any wonder, then, that the reportage and commentary issuing from that institution (and it’s acolytes) would be loaded with cliches and tropes while relying heavily upon official government and mainstream science pronouncements?
I think it reasonable to assume that reporting on the subject (in the foreseeable future) will continue to be reactive and smugly interpretative, rather than investigative.

The NY Times still occasionally breaks ranks and publishes things on questions surrounding, for example Building 7, maybe there are some people in there who remember some of the early UFO reporting and the whitewash nature of that and have come to understand 9/11 was an inside job and see some of the other happenings as being sort of business as usual… in a nutshell, I wouldn’t quite rule it out. There would probably have to be some impetus for them to publish on it, though.